Wednesday, 9 October 2013

And so The Greatest Doctor Who Story Ever Made™ comes to a close. It really is a corker, I think. OK, the monster is crap (and also needless), and there's a couple of bits of duff dialogue here and there -- but in the same way that no Who story is completely without merit, no great one is completely without some drawback. Everything else about Androzani is so exceptional -- particularly in this final part, where it all comes together magnificently -- that the minor sticking points can be largely overlooked.

Next time: after jumping 8½ years to get from the Fourth to Fifth Doctors, the time skipped to reach the Sixth is... one week. If you don't know what that means... well, you'll see...

In 2008, then-showrunner Russell T Davies and DWM journalist Benjamin Cook co-wrote a book about Davies' experiences writing & running Who. I devoured it in10daysbackinJanuary2009, because it was fascinatingly insightful, brilliantly written, and gorgeously designed to boot.

Come the time for a paperback version in 2010, and Davies had finished his time on the show -- the original book covered Davies' final full series, after which they (of course) produced a run of specials. So the paperback is updated to include those episodes... but what's extraordinary and special and wonderful is that this update isn't just a chapter or two stuck on the end, oh no. Of the paperback's 693 pages, fully 353 of them are part of the updated section. Or, to put it another way: over half. It's another whole book again! Wonderful if you didn't buy the original Writer's Tale (essentially you're getting a whole extra book free); and even if you did, it makes the paperback a worthwhile proposition (if they'd just published the new stuff it would surely command the same price).

I've had this second edition/sequel/whatever it is for years now (I got it for Christmas the year it came out, if I remember rightly; though as it's a 5th printing, maybe it was for a later birthday/etc); but, even though I loved the first volume, it somehow wound up being put unread on my shelf. Well, with the 50th anniversary fast approaching, what better time to dig it out and dig in? The only question: do I re-read all of what I read before (it is nearly 5 years ago now -- more than enough time has passed to need a recap/appreciate a re-experiencing), or just go straight to the new stuff? It's a bloody long thing to re-read, after all; but if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Something I notice before I begin: the original had 15 chapters (and an epilogue-bit), while this version of the first book has just 12. I don't imagine they've omitted three chapters' worth of stuff, so I guess it got restructured. They did remove the four early-draft scripts that were in the hardback, so perhaps that necessitated some combining of chapters. Anyway...